Some 500 miles and 19 months after the last conference on the
state of the world for Apache, developers and users gathered in Las
Vegas to converse again about the world's most popular web server.

After a day of tutorials, Ken Coar,
Apache Software Foundation member and Conference Chair introduced this
year's conference to the over 300 attendees. The conference
included 60 presentations, 16 Birds of
a Feather, 3 keynotes, and free access to the Comdex convention floor.
After a brief break, Ken Coar introduced Tim O'Reilly, Founder and President
of O'Reilly and Associates and his topic "Watching the Alpha Geeks."

O'Reilly opened with a quote from Sci-Fi writer William Gibson,
"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." saying
that Gibson describes exactly how one can understand the ever evolving
world of computer technology.

O'Reilly's premise is that the evolution of technology follows a
simple pattern that can be seen with the adoption and evolution of the
personal computer: Hackers such as those who formed the famous
Homebrew Computer Club started tinkering and developing computers for
personal use as they pushed the technological envelope; These
explorations evolved into businesses such as Apple and Microsoft as
entrepreneurs start to make the new technology easier for ordinary
users; As dominant players emerge that integrate the new technology
into a platform such as the Wintel platform where barriers can be
raised to keep other entrepreneurs from integrating into the new
platform or a healthy ecosystem of corporations can evolve to help the
new platform develop; And finally the hackers and entrepreneurs turn
their attention to new areas, looking for new frontiers such as that
of the Internet and its growth into a new computing platform.

O'Reilly moved on to what he sees going on now within the world of
hackers and the next group of entrepreneurs, with the growing world of
wireless networks, web services and the open source world.

So why then have companies struggled with trying to bring the
wireless world to the public or struggled to build a model around open
source software? Because according to O'Reilly, these companies are
still trapped thinking in the old model of cheap hardware and
proprietary software that defined the growth of the PC world, and that
just as companies such as IBM had to shift from their world of
mainframes and other proprietary hardware, the business leaders of
today need to change their point of reference in order to fare better
in these new, emerging worlds.

But most importantly, O'Reilly noted, was that the programmers who
build these new technologies, define these emerging technologies, are
designing the architecture of the next iteration of the computing
world. This, O'Reilly feels, is where the world of Apache can help:
by showing what models work in the evolving computer industry, that
of adhering to standards, of building a small, but robust application
with a modular design. In other words, what the hackers and
programmers have succeeded in doing with the Apache server, related
projects and how it is done, shows exactly what can and does work in
the technological world of tomorrow.

The schedule of sessions about Apache on Tuesday included a talk by
Mark Cox on Revealing Apache
Security Secrets, Jim Jagielski's talk on Migrating to Apache 2.0,
a presentation on the new Proxy module for Apache 2.0 by Graham
Leggett, along with Theo Schlossnagle and George Schlossnagle who put
together a session on deploying
scaleable network architectures. The evening ended
with a welcoming reception giving food and drinks for attendees to enjoy
while they socialized and viewed the exhibit floor.

Wednesday's late morning keynote featured John Fowler, CTO of
Software for Sun whose speech "Sun and Open Source: A Bright Future"
allowed Fowler to discussed Sun's commitment to Open Standards and the
Open Source community.

Fowler noted that since Sun's founding over two decades ago, the
use of open standards and community participation has been of major
importance. Fowler believes that since the founding of Sun there has
been an overall shift within the computer industry from developing and
selling new technology to that of building solutions that implement
open standards. This shift is allowing technology that might originate
from competing vendors to work together, providing an overall solution
a customer can use, instead of having various vendor components that
might solve one problem or another, but overall don't communicate or
work together. Moreover, Fowler believes that the Apache project is a
prefect example of open standards at work since the server is widely
used and of such a benefit because of what standards it implements and
how it handles those implementations.

In relation to the open source community at large, Fowler noted the
major contributions Sun has made not only to Apache and related
projects such as Tomcat, but also in non-Apache related projects such
as the Gnome desktop and OpenOffice.org. Fowler feels that the work
Sun has done with projects such as Apache have fundamentally changed
how Sun operates, noting that open source communities can magnify the
impact of a software project, not just in how many developers
contribute or what is contributed but also in actual deployment of a
project's technical solutions, because of the overall openness of the
community.

A number of large and small companies shared their unique view of
Apache and the open source world on the expo floor during the three
days of talks.

AMD and Covalent took the most advantage of the conference by announcing
a co-development project that includes Red Hat to port the Apache
code base from the 32-bit architecture that allows it to run on the
most commonly found x86 microprocessors to the 64-bit architecture
that AMD is developing for its Opteron line of processors

To help highlight John Fowler's speech the Sun booth was dedicated
to the various open source projects, both Apache and non-Apache as
well as exhibiting the versatility of it's Java programming language
again in conjunction with the Apache server as well as on its
own.

Apple highlighted its Apple Developer Connection, which assists
developers in deploying desktop and server systems based on Apple's
Macintosh OS X platform. Apple of course has a number of web and network related tools
available and includes the Apache Web Server by default in both
the desktop and server versions of OS X.

Sams Publishing and BreakPoint Books were on hand to sell Apache and other
web related books for the conference attendees. The books available covered
just about any subject, from basic CGI programming to Java Servlets to
Apache 2.0. A few other retail vendors filled out the low key expo floor
including Daemon News which was featuring BSD Mall and
Hackerthreads.com.

Thursday, the final day for ApacheCon featured a keynote from Richard Thieme whose speech,
"New Ways of Thinking About Security: Open Source Thinking in a
Bunged-up World" picked up where Tim O'Reilly left off by reiterating
the idea that open source is more than just about code, but in reality
is a way of living and thinking. This open source way of thinking is
at its fundamental level based on the methods of communication that
are commonly used within open source projects. Thieme also noted that,
these projects and more importantly those that contribute and use open
source technology, have become fluid individuals who's own identity is
more modular, less ridged than of past generations, primarily because
of the modular, distributed communication systems that are now are
commonly used.

Just as O'Reilly sees his 'Alpha Geeks' as the early adaptors of
technology, Thieme sees these early adaptors of open source and the
open source ethic as a new social network emerging from preexisting
boundaries. Because of this, Thieme thinks that security issues from
around the world need to be seen in this new distributed world
view. He noted that ApacheCon was indeed about a community coming
together in a physical location, but really is about sharing secrets
and how the Apache community shares its secrets, or chooses not to, can
help those who are charged with building the next generation of
security policies and laws. In other words issues of security,
privacy and even intellectual property need to be built based on these
new emerging communities and boundaries, thus being beneficial instead
of building policies and laws that enforce old political and social
boundaries that no longer make sense in the new world based on
modular, world of networked communities.

Presentations on Apache for Thursday included Greg Stein's session
introducing WebDAV and
Apache as well as Rob McCool's presentation on the Stanford
University's project to deploy machine readable content on the
web. Mads Toftum's session on doing URL manipulation using
mod_rewrite, Mark Wilcox's session on implementing LDAP along with
presentations on data management in Apache 2.0 by Cliff Woolley and
performance turning Apache by Thomas Wouters helped round out
afternoon.

No doubt the highlight for many at this year's ApacheCon
attendees was the Closing Session where Ken Coar raffled off a
number of goodies supplied by the conference vendors including books,
AMD processors and other wonderful swag. But most importantly to those
in attendance and to the Apache community at large came the
announcement that 2003 will see two ApacheCon conferences, the return
of ApacheCon Europe which will occur in the spring at a location yet to be
determined and ApacheCon US which will return to Las Vegas in
November.

Overall most attendees seemed impressed with the return of
ApacheCon. While the production of the event was modest compared to
previous conferences the quality of the presenters and the
presentations where of the same high quality one would expect. Indeed,
with so many interesting talks it was easy to find people cutting out
of one presentation to hear the end of another and
this report only mentions the
more typical Apache topics available for attendees. Most importantly,
ApacheCon has shown that it is still The Apache Event for Apache
developers and users to come together and discuss everyones favorite
web server.